Changing entrenched work culture is hard. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being.
My colleagues at ideas42 set out to talk to employees at nonprofit organizations who wanted to reduce work-life conflict. Nonprofits are often classic overwork and burnout cultures. People work “hero hours” because they’re passionate about the issues and see the work as mission-driven. Nonprofits also tend to be woefully understaffed and underresourced, so people aren’t paid much and don’t have a lot of support, which intensifies the workload. And if the work, barring radical change, likely won’t be done in a lifetime, it’s difficult to know when to call it a day.
One thing struck me immediately. In conversation after conversation, workers said they spent their days being super busy, rushing from one meeting to the next, jumping on and off the phone, and plowing through their email. It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do. Their work hours were constantly interrupted and filled with busywork.
Researchers have found that desk workers in an office setting tend to be interrupted about every three minutes. And after that colleague has dropped by or we’ve switched screens to check email, texts, social media, or a pinging notification, it can take, on average, twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds to get back to where we were. Over and over and over throughout the day.
Then there are the meetings. One survey found that executives spend, on average, twenty-five hours a week in meetings, half of which could disappear without any negative impact. Those lower down the corporate ladder spend about ten hours a week in meetings and say 43 percent are a waste of time. But they go because they have to, or they fear they’ll miss out, or they want to show their managers how busy and committed they are. This means huge swaths of the workweek are a huge waste of time and money. One Bain and Company study found that after accounting for meetings, excessive emails, office chitchat, or unproductive conversations and low-value administrative tasks—all unproductive busywork—the typical middle manager has only six and a half uninterrupted hours a week to do their actual work.
I have come to think of work in three ways. There’s the “real” work—the tasks and outcomes that create value for the organization and give employees a sense of meaning and pride. There’s the “work around the work”—all the emails and meetings, some necessary, many not, that can consume entire days. And then there’s what I call the “performance of work”: sending late-night emails or Slack messages, showing up at the office or online early and staying late, shaming those who take lunch breaks, giving the appearance of super productive busyness when you’re really wrapped up in low-value tasks or focusing on email rather than making progress on a big project. Authors Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel call the phenomenon “live-action-role-playing the job.” In overwork work cultures, those who appear to perform well are often the ones who are rewarded.
It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do.
Yet when we’re busy and have that high-octane, panicked feeling that time is scarce—what one participant called the “sustained moment of hecticness” through the workday—our attention and ability to focus narrow. Behavioral science researchers call this phenomenon “tunneling.” And like being in a tunnel, in that heightened state of time scarcity and busyness, we’re only able to concentrate on the most immediate and often low-value tasks right in front of us. (Research has found we lose about 13 IQ points in this situation.)
“If you’re in this firefighting state of time pressure and tunneling, you’re not making time to meet long-term goals. You’re not dealing with any of the root causes that led to the firefighting in the first place,” said Matthew Darling, then ideas42 vice president and project lead. “The tendency is to do the stuff that’s easy to check off. That’s all you have the bandwidth for.” So the high-value work spills into what should be time off.”
After hearing from workers about being caught up in busyness culture, my ideas42 colleagues started thinking about a new “mental model” of an ideal worker with work-life balance. To paint this new picture, ideas42 designers at the time Dan Connolly and Uyhun Ung worked with participants to imagine a workplace that valued work-life balance and how that would change the social signals people sent. At work, all people see are others working. When they see late-night emails or texts, they often assume that their coworker or boss has been working all day and night without interruption, when in fact they might have been walking the dog or having dinner with their families. That life outside work doesn’t register because they don’t see it. (Often people don’t want to share their lives outside work with coworkers and bosses to preserve the busyness myth that they’re always working.)
“You end up miscalibrating,” Darling explained, thinking that people are working more than they actually are, so you automatically think you have to do the same to keep up. For an ideal work-life balance workplace, designers imagined leaders who were open about taking lunch breaks, working flexibly, going on vacation, and sharing more about their lives and families outside of work.
Having envisaged this new type of leader, my colleagues then designed, implemented, and tested practical interventions focused on four key pain points: long hours, endless and often pointless meetings, the guilt people felt about vacations (which they often didn’t take), and email. The goal of the project was to help organizations take a more thoughtful and proactive approach and to pilot different types of interventions that could help their employees find better work-life balance.
Humans already have a tough time estimating how much time and effort are needed to accomplish things. The busyness imperative only exacerbates the tendency to underestimate and overpromise. So one intervention asked workers to schedule big blocks in their calendars for their most important uninterrupted work, rather than, as many of us do, expecting it to just happen at some point during the workweek. Then the designers encouraged workers to create open space or slack in their calendars every week so that, instead of getting to the end of the day or week without having done that big project, they had a built-in cushion in case they had underestimated the time or an unanticipated emergency cropped up. “You almost always need a lot more slack than you think you will,” Darling explained, “and it is actually markedly important for doing good work.”
My colleagues designed interventions focused on four key pain points: long hours, endless meetings, the guilt people felt about vacations, and email.
Intentional scheduling that you share with coworkers makes it much more apparent that calling a meeting involves a trade-off. What are you not doing because you’re being asked to go to a meeting? And is the meeting the better use of time? The intervention also called for organizations to design and enforce better “meeting hygiene.” Meetings account for about 15 percent of an organization’s time, a share that has increased steadily in recent years. Many are not run well and are a waste of productive time that adds to the busy overwork culture. In the intervention, an agenda would be circulated before every meeting listing clear goals to keep things short and focused on discussion, debate, and decisions. Those calling the meeting were encouraged to be judicious about who needed to be in the room or on the call rather than putting out a blanket invitation, which can wind up being a time suck and an impediment to getting the most important work done. One study, for instance, found that one organization’s routine weekly executive meeting cost a total of three hundred thousand hours a year.
To encourage time for rest and vacation, some organizations experimented with nudging workers to put their summer breaks on their calendars as early as January or February, when the summer months were likely to be clear, rather than a few weeks beforehand, when calendars are cluttered with meetings and obligations. Planning early would force teams to map out how to meet deadlines and delegate tasks so people would no longer feel compelled to work on vacation. My colleagues helped design vacation prep checklists, an activity that recognizes the work involved in planning time off and gives team members the tools to prepare so that they can all successfully unplug. They encouraged organizations to experiment with allocating two vacation “transition days”—one before vacation and the other the first day back in the office, with the only expectation being that they use the time to disconnect and reconnect with work.
One organization adopted a “vacation roulette” intervention. The HR team found every person who hadn’t used their vacation days over a 90-day period and sent them a note reminding them of their vacation balance and copying their manager. They then sent them an invitation to take a random Monday or Friday off and signed the note, “From your vacation fairy godmother.” Often, the managers would encourage workers to take a break. Another organization experimented with closing down between Christmas and New Year’s. That changed the conversation, one participant told me, from the usual snarky, “Going on vacation? Must be nice for some,” to a more welcoming, “Tell me about your break and I’ll tell you about mine.” Research in Sweden found that when everyone takes vacation at the same time like that, there’s less guilt, a big boost to mental health, and the entire organization—or in Sweden’s case, the entire country—benefits from “collective restoration.”
My ideas42 colleagues also designed a tool to enable workers to pause their email inboxes in an “It Can Wait” campaign. They sent reminders to people at the end of each workday asking whether they had paused their inboxes. They sought to amplify the effort with a campaign to affirm people’s identities outside of work, sharing postcards showing happy people running, cooking, painting, reading a book to a child, and so on.
Some of these interventions showed promise. Vacation-taking interventions in particular led to encouraging results. For instance, during the “vacation roulette” intervention—where managers were copied on an email encouraging employees with high vacation balances to take a day off—participating organizations saw a boost in days off for over 20 employees, and the highest rate of vacation taking for India-based employees in 5 years. Some employees used the day to treat themselves to an experience they didn’t commonly make time for, like a visit to the spa. Others simply used the time to relax at home. “Having that day with family and coming back fresh helped me put things into perspective for the workshop I’ve been preparing,” one employee said.
The interventions that didn’t work were those aimed at individuals taking individual action to improve their personal work-life balance. Those that were more successful involved a change to the entire system.
Interventions to ease the pain of email were, perhaps not surprisingly, among the least successful. My then-ideas42-colleague Antonia Violante reflected on why some interventions had caught hold and others had not. The ones that didn’t work were those aimed at individuals taking individual action to improve their personal work-life balance. Those that were more successful involved a change to the entire system. “You can’t design a work-redesign intervention aimed at one person,” Violante concluded. “For it to stick, people have to have the assurance that it’s aimed at the whole culture.”
Leaders at many of the organizations had the best of intentions. They expressed a desire for better work- life balance, if not for themselves then at least for their staff. But they, too, were caught up in the prevailing busyness culture. Some were among the worst offenders, texting at 9:00 p.m., emailing over the weekend, even in the middle of the night, and rarely taking vacation. Many leaders knew they weren’t walking the talk: “We do a poor job modeling” work-life balance, they would say. Yet they appeared powerless to change themselves or their busyness cultures.
“One of the things I found odd is that people were acutely aware of how bad they are with work-life balance and they wanted to be better, but they’ve almost accepted it, almost like, ‘It is what it is,’” Violante told me. While many workers we spoke to were clearly frustrated by how work encroached on their lives, they were also conflicted by the strong norm to brag about their overwork as a sign of their dedication, like wearing a badge of honor. Some reported that though they saw the benefit of work-life balance, they routinely overworked to the point of exhaustion. “If we all hated our jobs,” one participant told us, “it would be much easier to create work-life balance.”
Adapted from Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind into a Quest for a Better Life by Brigid Schulte. Published by Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2024 by Brigid Schulte. All rights reserved.
Disclosure: ideas42 provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting Behavioral Scientist’s nonprofit mission.
